Some of the best writing about the 2016 election was fanfiction

Among the darker times of this election, these writers shone with humor and imagination.

The 2016 election suffered from a plague of misinformation, so it's strange to realize that some of the year's best political writing was, technically speaking, fiction.

Among the breakout stars of hard news coverage like NBC's Katy Tur and the Washington Post's David Farenthold, a handful of satirists made their mark during a punishing election cycle that often felt too ridiculous to satirize.

Jeb! The Musical

Arriving at the height of Hamiltonfever, Jeb! The Musical skewered the Republican primaries with an expert eye for the major players: Jeb Bush as Hamilton, Donald Trump as his nemesis Aaron Burr, and Florida Voters ("Jeb loves them") and Florida Interests ("Jeb wants to be with them") as the dual romantic leads Eliza and Angelica Schuyler.

Trump: How does the pampered brother, son of a George and a Barbara,Dropped in the middle of a forgotten spot with some Floridians,By politics and Charles Koch’s donationsGrow up to somehow miss the nomination

Christie:The million-dollar, front runner, engraving gunner[1]Got no farther by working no harderBy being no smarterBy being a non-starterBy 45, they placed him in charge of a state charter

Cruz:And everyday while votes were being written and cast away across the statesJeb refused to be a goner;Inside he was ready to be just like his fatherBut his brother was the one who the country went and honored

Written by a creative team of 20 people (plus a crowd of contributors), the musical appeared out of nowhere in a Google doc, exhibiting an admirably in-depth knowledge of both Hamilton and the tragicomic subtext of Bush's failed bid for the presidency.

Seven months later, Jeb! now feels like a parody of a more innocent era in American politics. Luckily, the script includes footnote links to the relevant news stories, in case you've forgotten some of the more obscure details of primary season.

Owen Ellickson's Twitter

The Daily Show and SNL often felt painfully bland and irrelevant this year, arriving late to the mark—or sometimes not at all. Meanwhile on Twitter, comedy writer Owen Ellickson was building a longform story about the chaos behind the scenes of each campaign.

TRUMP: My other idea for the convention: I saw these roided-up guys on TV who tear up phonebooks. Great stuff. I'll need 17 million dollars

Ellickson's election tweets began as Weird Twitter one-liners and quick conversations between the candidates and their lackeys. But as the year wore on, his lengthening Twitter threads evolved distinct characterization and surreal worldbuilding. Woven into the more straightforward jokes about current events, we saw things like Trump revealing his doomsday plans to his long-suffering campaign manager Kellyanne Conway, who consistently referred to her candidate as "it."

TRUMP: My favorite scenario is Trump TV. Second favorite's Armageddon, last is becoming President. So we gotta thread a needle here.CONWAY:

Ellickson's election storylines ranged from realistic (House Speaker Paul Ryan's helpless exhaustion in the face of Trump's antics) to hilariously bizarre (the Baldwin brothers as an insular society with Alec Baldwin passing judgment as the "king"), a kind of fast-moving storytelling that could only work on Twitter, in an already Twitter-obsessed election year.

Alexandra Petri in the Washington Post

Alexandra Petri is perhaps the only writer on this list who would explicitly characterize her work as fanfiction, although most fanfic authors don't have a contract with the Washington Post.

my phone autocorrects "financial" to "fanfic jail" if you want to know exactly how my life is going right now

Caught somewhere between the sharp satire of the Onion, the warmth and savviness of the Toast, and the informative nature of The Daily Show, Petri's column wrung humor out of the darkest days of this interminable election.

“Who?” But Melania knew that Donald could only possibly mean one person. There had been so many framed pictures of him in the house, working the red carpet like a pro, smiling his megawatt smile. The man with the alliterative name. (Or was it assonant? No, Melania thought, alliterative had been right. Assonant was for vowel sounds.) Billy Bush. How Donald idolized him! How he looked up to him! Just the other day when Donald was doing a few tentative exercises with his chest expander, Melania had whispered to him, “That’s the spirit, Donald! Soon you will have abs like Billy Bush!” And Donald had smiled all over, as though the compliment warmed him from the inside out. He had worked the chest expander until he sweated profusely.

Petri's work stands out not just because she had the stamina to keep writing like this months on end, but because her humor relies on a kernel of sincerity. On the eve of the election, her latest column explored an alternate timeline where Trump's life was changed by reading a novel called The Kingfisher as a child: an appropriately strange and heartfelt epilogue to the year.

Since retiring as host of The Daily Show last year, Jon Stewart has, with a few exceptions, kept his voice out of the 2016 election’s comedic discourse. But he’s entering the fray once again to attack Donald Trump.